> My point would be more that the work Valve has put into the Deck has enabled far more than the work the standards committees have done with CSS.
Citation very, very much needed. Valve's work on Steam Input absolutely pales in comparison to the web. The number of supported games is minuscule. If the Steam Deck is our standard for cross-compatibility on the web, that's just really low standards. That's not the world I want to live in, CSS is better.
> But, that is missing that current gen games are usually at the absolute bleeding edge of what the absolute best devices are even capable of. It is not at all surprising that those do not work cross device that well.
No, the opposite. I'm talking about indie titles and AA titles and the average games put out by normal studios. Ironically, the giant AAA studios often have much better accessibility controls and cross-platform support. If you buy a AAA game, you're much more likely to have access to something like text scaling or dyslexic-friendly fonts or multiple input schemes, because those studios have the resources to care more about diverse use-cases, those studios have the money and developers to ask questions like "what happens if the user's TV is far away from them?"
Indie studios don't. And the fact that there's a divide between indie and AAA games on something as basic as resizing text, something that is supported on every single website -- that should be enough to show you that this "individually supported device" concept is just not workable in the real world. The games industry can't even get universal text scaling and you think that's a success story?
> But we gave up on "user stylesheets" ages ago. And the cascading nature of how things interact is almost certainly not well understood by a large portion of the practitioners
Sure, training is difficult and the web is counterintuitive to UI designers that are used to working in Photoshop, but I would still maintain that I have far fewer interface problems on the web than I do on native devices and in games, and that's not even taking into account that I see websites put up by far worse developers and far smaller teams with far smaller budgets than any of the native apps on my computer or phone.
We're never going to be perfect at this. One issue is that ironically many UI problems on the web when you dig into them often end up being due to concessions to developers on device-specific breakpoints. The web allows you to decide that you aren't going to care about being responsive and to act like you're building a video game that will only ever be displayed full-screen. If you really want to, you can design your interfaces like you're an indie developer using Unity and you can absolute position all of your divs. And there are problems with having those escape hatches, but the concessions are important because this is an unsolveable problem and sometimes devs need those escape hatches. So we add even more complexity onto an unsolveable problem to help cover use-cases that we can't cover any other way.
But solveable or not, complex or not, ignoring the problem is not the solution.
And it still is just very clearly the case to me that if we're looking at what platform does responsive design the best and which platform has the best compatibility stats between multiple devices, the web is going to win every single comparison with every other platform. It's not even close.
Yeah, things could be better, and yeah, CSS has problems, but the alternatives are just so, so much worse for actual end-users. Getting the vast majority of content on a platform to work across every single device from voice assistants to desktops to tablets to phones to VR is an achievement that no other platform can point to. And CSS does that without requiring you to have a AAA game budget when you build a website.
The number of supported games on Valve is minuscule? We clearly play different games. :) (In seriousness, sucks that you are having bad experiences there. Good luck on that changing!)
That said, you seem to be taking the strongest version of my claim here. I don't think they have solved things any more than anyone else. And I fully grant that video games are largely not accessible.
My argument would lean more into the way that photoshop and other visual tools had done things. If you want to visually layout something, using visual tools is almost certainly the correct answer. Back in the day, you would start with grid paper and literally draft out what you wanted. From there, you would have a relative coordinate system that you would then code against.
CSS and a ton of developer created things almost always focus on symbolic ideas. And it turns out jumping straight to the symbolic gets you into a ton of naming and aliasing issues ridiculously quickly. That and general purpose cascading of rules is just not that useful for the vast majority of things that we do. Is why design tools such as Figma let you put the properties directly on what you are designing. It is how people design.
And, again, I /agree/ that CSS is workable how it is today. There has been a ton of manpower put into it. But I don't know that we are comparing apples to apples in alternatives. Someone mentioned turbo pascal earlier and the form builders they had. People were doing better designs with dream weaver than I typically see online today. We didn't like it because it made the documents basically unreadable. But, we left that goal behind years ago, and missed out on the design tool that we had at hand.
> (In seriousness, sucks that you are having bad experiences there. Good luck on that changing!)
To be clear, I'm not having bad experiences on the Steam Deck, it's a fantastic device. Highly recommend it, I feel like Valve built a computer specifically for me. :) But compared to the web, it's minuscule. Compared to the web, the number of games on Steam in general is minuscule. The web is so big. Nothing that Valve is doing compares to the size and scope of what the web supports.
And in terms of support, the percentages of games that are playable across all of these devices out of the total number of games that Steam has is much lower. Again, doesn't mean that Valve isn't doing great work, but if Valve went into overdrive tomorrow and got 80% of the games on Steam working on the Steam Deck -- the web does better than that.
It would be great, I'd be very happy about it, I'd have a ton of games to play. But the web just so thoroughly outclasses that, there is no platform success story that comes close to the compatibility that the web has, and this is even with the web being a far bigger platform with a wider range of content than basically any computing platform I can think of.
It's not so much that everyone else is terrible, it's that the web is so wildly successful at getting apps to be cross-device compatible that you basically need to hit 95-99% to start comparing to it. Valve is nowhere close to hitting those kinds of numbers, even with Steam which is (as big as it is) minuscule compared to the amount of content on the web.
Valve's approach and the approach of games on Steam just wouldn't scale to the size of something as big as the web, a platform where anyone can publish anything without going through a Greenlight process or doing compatibility checks for every device.
----
> My argument would lean more into the way that photoshop and other visual tools had done things. If you want to visually layout something, using visual tools is almost certainly the correct answer. Back in the day, you would start with grid paper and literally draft out what you wanted.
Right, but I think that's just been proven to not work if you want to get a lot of people (including low-code developers and content-producers) on the scale of the web to design interfaces for multiple devices. I would argue that as inconvenient as they are, symbolic ideas are just the only way to do it.
Note that CSS allows you to do multiple interfaces depending on the device/resolution/etc... but what's important about CSS is that it doesn't allow to ignore the symbolic part, because (opinion me) the symbolic part is just part of designing interfaces.
Even forgetting about the multi-device support (which I think any platform that focuses on pure visual layout with fixed resolutions will when examined turn out to have worse multi-device support and smaller numbers of multi-device apps than the web has) -- but ignoring that, I will also argue that if you can't think symbolically about your interface and you can't lay it out as a pure-text hierarchical interface, you can't really effectively build accessible apps. One of the other reasons why I think Photoshop is kind of a bad tool for building interfaces is that I see UI developers jump into it and design interfaces based purely on "I want this to show up on this pixel" and they're not thinking about grouping, they don't have constraints to force their interfaces to be more consistent, they're not thinking about what's going to happen when the app gets translated into multiple languages, they're not thinking about screenreader support or keyboard controls.
Genuinely, I believe that forcing yourself to design interfaces in text before you sit down and look at the visuals makes you a better UI designer, because UI design cares about affordances and grouping and concepts that are being translated to the user. And without being too harsh on designers that are used to those visual tools, I can tell the difference between a designer that works in Figma and a designer that works in Photoshop because one of them will hand me a design that still works if I change the font size, and one of them will give me a blank look and not know how to react if I ask them whether we can change the font size.
I don't want to be harsh about it or put people down or be extreme, but like... I keep coming back to, I know it would be nice if we could just lay out everything visually in Photoshop. It would be great, it would make UI design so much easier. But UI design is all the difficult stuff, it's not hard to lay out things out in Photoshop, it's hard to design UIs that work in the real world. And sometimes the complaint about "why do I have to think symbolically" feels like a traffic designer saying "why do I need to worry about rush hour why doesn't everyone just drive uniformly like they do in my simulations." I'm sorry, but they don't. They do weird things and run red lights and clog intersections, and we pay UI designers to be able to handle the messy details of the real world.
> Is why design tools such as Figma let you put the properties directly on what you are designing. It is how people design.
I'll push back on this a bit; one of the strengths of Figma is that it pushes UI designers (gently, but still pushes them) in a symbolic direction. Sure, not everyone needs to sit down and write CSS by hand. Not everyone needs to learn Javascript, they can use template libraries. Not everyone needs to learn how to design websites, they can use Wordpress. There's no shame at all in building tools on top of things to make them more accessible, that's part of the web's DNA.
But Figma is CSS from the start. The CSS might not be in your face, but Figma is designed to force designers to care more about responsive design. It just has low-code options, the same as Unity of RPG Maker does for game design. But it's still thinking symbolically and logically about interfaces and not just thinking about pixels.
I don't think I ignored any points here, but in other threads we had going. I think we have a slight disagreement on how successful visual tools have been, but I see that as fine to have as a disagreement. In particular, I do not think we should force all thinking down one or the other and would expect preferences to bias people between the two. My gripe with developers is that so few seem to have ever used a visual designer nowadays.
I also realize I didn't say I enjoyed the conversation! If there is something in this one that you'd like to dive more on, please reping it.
Citation very, very much needed. Valve's work on Steam Input absolutely pales in comparison to the web. The number of supported games is minuscule. If the Steam Deck is our standard for cross-compatibility on the web, that's just really low standards. That's not the world I want to live in, CSS is better.
> But, that is missing that current gen games are usually at the absolute bleeding edge of what the absolute best devices are even capable of. It is not at all surprising that those do not work cross device that well.
No, the opposite. I'm talking about indie titles and AA titles and the average games put out by normal studios. Ironically, the giant AAA studios often have much better accessibility controls and cross-platform support. If you buy a AAA game, you're much more likely to have access to something like text scaling or dyslexic-friendly fonts or multiple input schemes, because those studios have the resources to care more about diverse use-cases, those studios have the money and developers to ask questions like "what happens if the user's TV is far away from them?"
Indie studios don't. And the fact that there's a divide between indie and AAA games on something as basic as resizing text, something that is supported on every single website -- that should be enough to show you that this "individually supported device" concept is just not workable in the real world. The games industry can't even get universal text scaling and you think that's a success story?
> But we gave up on "user stylesheets" ages ago. And the cascading nature of how things interact is almost certainly not well understood by a large portion of the practitioners
Sure, training is difficult and the web is counterintuitive to UI designers that are used to working in Photoshop, but I would still maintain that I have far fewer interface problems on the web than I do on native devices and in games, and that's not even taking into account that I see websites put up by far worse developers and far smaller teams with far smaller budgets than any of the native apps on my computer or phone.
We're never going to be perfect at this. One issue is that ironically many UI problems on the web when you dig into them often end up being due to concessions to developers on device-specific breakpoints. The web allows you to decide that you aren't going to care about being responsive and to act like you're building a video game that will only ever be displayed full-screen. If you really want to, you can design your interfaces like you're an indie developer using Unity and you can absolute position all of your divs. And there are problems with having those escape hatches, but the concessions are important because this is an unsolveable problem and sometimes devs need those escape hatches. So we add even more complexity onto an unsolveable problem to help cover use-cases that we can't cover any other way.
But solveable or not, complex or not, ignoring the problem is not the solution.
And it still is just very clearly the case to me that if we're looking at what platform does responsive design the best and which platform has the best compatibility stats between multiple devices, the web is going to win every single comparison with every other platform. It's not even close.
Yeah, things could be better, and yeah, CSS has problems, but the alternatives are just so, so much worse for actual end-users. Getting the vast majority of content on a platform to work across every single device from voice assistants to desktops to tablets to phones to VR is an achievement that no other platform can point to. And CSS does that without requiring you to have a AAA game budget when you build a website.